Questions about the latest versions of Gnollhack, regarding RC files and movement keys

[kozmikyak]

Either the latest release (pre-alpha) or the latest 4.0 version:

* With the latest Windows releasee, is the terminal version still able to be used? Only seem to have GnollHackW.exe which loads into a GUI? If not, I'll compile for Linux.

* With any version, do they support an RC file with settings? Where does it go?

* With any version, can you, through an RC file or other means, can one restore the VI-style movement keys?

I find myself interested in this version of Nethack, but I really rely on an RC file and VI-style movement keys due to 30 years of muscle memory as a vi user (first job was as a sysadmin) and as a Hack, then Nethack, player. I could try to get used to non-VI-style movement keys, but it's a hard sell for me to get used to that after all this time.

The solution might indeed end up being playing online, as I found at least one linux-hosted online version that supported hjkl movement keys.

But aside from minor critique--looks like you're doing good work here.

 

[kozmikyak]

Figured out that you can restore the original movement keys by setting number_pad to 0 just as in vanilla Nethack, but still don't know what the RC file is named/located on Windows.

But for the time being, I'm having fun on the public GnollHack server. This is a masterpiece even in its current pre-alpha form.

 

[Tommi Gustafsson]

Either the latest release (pre-alpha) or the latest 4.0 version:

* With the latest Windows releasee, is the terminal version still able to be used? Only seem to have GnollHackW.exe which loads into a GUI? If not, I'll compile for Linux.

Yes, GnollHack.exe can be used, but we removed it from the release files, so that people do not have confusion between GUI and ASCII versions.

* With any version, do they support an RC file with settings? Where does it go?

It goes to the same directory as the exe file and is named defaults.gnh, according to the way it was done in NetHack 3.6.2.

But for the time being, I'm having fun on the public GnollHack server. This is a masterpiece even in its current pre-alpha form.

Thanks for the feedback! We are also working on an Android version at the moment. It is missing some graphics at the moment, but we expect it to be released in 2022. We created a whole new touch-based GUI for Android. It's also portable to iOS with minor trouble, since it makes use of cross-platform Xamarin technology.

 

[kozmikyak]

Thanks so much for the answer!

To get "GnollHack.exe" for the latest version, would one need to compile it from scratch on Windows? How difficult is this process for someone familiar with basic operation of Visual Studio or mingw?

Alternatively I suppose I could compile it for Windows WSL on the built-in Ubuntu distro, I'm comfortable with that.

Thanks again for your super-fast response.

 

[Tommi Gustafsson]

We built the latest source code for you and uploaded the binaries to our server. You can find the game in a ZIP file here:

https://download.gnollhack.com/temp/GnollHack-4100-PA5-2021-11-27.zip